it's Autistics Speaking Day tomorrow (11/01)
I'm too fucking tired/too much of a douche
be better than I am!!

I may have a post out in a few days or maybe tomorrow night if I decide to be amazing

okay so I'm finishing up Six Feet Under and I want to know if I'm some kind of alien for thinking that Claire is a horrible person and a horrible girlfriend for Billy who treats him like an accessory and then is all surprised when he isn't one? or am I just not willing to accept him as a ~disabled villain when that's really how he's intended?

band names list

I keep losing this in the depths of my tumblr so I'm going to put it where I can actually locate it.

Clayton and I will never sync up on this. I like flowery/pretentious names. Probably I am going to have pretend that every time I record a little more music, it is a "side project" and gets its own name.

The List

Mirror Scare
God's Green Earth
Uncle!
Ice Cream Machine
The Talking Beasts
The Enchanted Forest
Dark Dates
HeartSaver
Flight One
Armchair Farmhouse
War Turtles
Stephen Magnet
Ashtray Trashcan
Sinners in the Hands of a Lonely Ghost

some rediscovered embarrassing ones from high school:

Courtly Love/Courtly Hate
Your Teeming Fingernails
Her Faded Sneakers
Your Blinding Mind/My Dastardly Plans
The Woods Behind Your House
Isolation Brigade
The Honor Students
Targets of Bullying
Your Delicate Mouth
Breath Control

WHO ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?? or, sorry Pancho

When I was in high school I went to a therapeutic summer camp and I used to make fun of our group therapy sessions all the time. It would go like this:

Staff: I want everyone to say something that's wrong with the camp environment this summer.
Camper: I feel like people are more cliquey than they were last year.
Staff: Which people? Are you talking about me? We don't know who you're talking about.
Camper: Oh I don't know.
Staff: Well, you must have been talking about someone.
Camper: I guess I was talking about...Sam.
Staff: What did he do?
Camper: Well, I guess he always hangs out with his girlfriend and not with other people.
Staff: Sam, how do you feel about that?

It was kind of like a rooster fight. But most Internet drama makes me long to return to my days of rooster fighting at camp. I see so many exchanges that go like this:

Person: Ringo said THIS.
Ringo: Hey, I'm sorry if it sounded like that, but I didn't mean that. I don't think I said what you're saying I said.
Person: Oh hi Ringo! I didn't think you said that. I understand. That's just what some people thought you said.

Or this:

Person: People were doing this and this and this and it felt like this!
Stefan: I'm so sorry if I was doing that or causing it to feel like that.
Person: Oh, I didn't mean you Stefan, you were great.
Damon: Are you talking about me? I really don't think it's fair to say I was doing that. And I can't help it if it felt like that to you.
Person: No, I didn't really mean you Damon. You didn't do anything wrong.
Klaus: I was there, am I one of the people who did something? I'm new to these kind of interactions and I don't really know if I conducted myself right.
Person: No, you were fine Klaus. Don't worry.

Let's say that Klaus, Damon, and Stefan were some of the most talkative people in this instance of Internet conversation and/or drama. So what happened? What is the Person talking about? Was the Internet drama like the Person is saying, or not?

Most importantly...who was phone? If the Person doesn't think that either Klaus, Damon, or Stefan did this and this and this, but somehow the conversation was like this and this and this, who did it? Was there a magical fog in the air that made something bad happen without any individual people doing anything wrong?

I know this is a tall order, but can we please start being honest with people if we think they did something? Or--as I think sometimes happens--if we have a "feeling" about a group of people, but when we look at all the individuals, we realize that none of them actually did the thing we're "feeling," can we admit that maybe it didn't happen that way?

Actually, maybe it would be more efficient to just say that a lot of the posts I see about the TPGA Dialogues...well, your lips keep moving, but all I hear is

Privilege and the TPGA Dialogues

This is kind of a draft for a comment I want to write somewhere, but might end up not posting if I can't get it out right.

Basically, I see a lot of people talking about the TPGA dialogues as a situation when parents and self-advocates were both focused on the issues that personally affected them and didn't want to listen to the other side or didn't want to compromise.

As a person with a disability, I'd just like to say: I love parents. They're totally sweet. I read some parent blogs that I really like and that are helpful to me in thinking about anti-ableism more broadly (since most of the disabled people I meet on the Internet have certain abilities by definition). But this doesn't have much to do with the reasons a lot of Autistic people on the TPGA threads were saying things that made parents feel "uncomfortable" and "silenced."

I think it comes down to the fact that a lot of the Autistic people who were in the conversation are involved in the kind of Internet social justice atmosphere where the concept of privilege is very central. The article I linked to probably isn't the best explanation of privilege, but it is hard to find one article or blog post that explains it really well. But basically privilege refers to the benefits that someone has when they don't belong to an oppressed group. For example I have white privilege and class privilege (and a lot of other kinds of privilege).

A really important aspect of privilege is that a lot of people who have it may not realize that they have it or how much and this can lead to a tendency to center their own experience because they don't realize how much their experience is already centered. That tendency can take the form of feeling like something is being taken away from them when in fact a situation is being made more equal. (I'm not trying to attack anyone by saying this, I just want to explain the concept.)

Where I went to college, there was a fairly big community of students who either were trans or cared a lot about being supportive of people who were trans. In almost every student group and even occasionally in classes, it had become the norm to ask people to state their preferred pronoun when introducing themselves. This can make things easier for someone who is often perceived as a different gender from what they actually are, since they can address potential misunderstandings before they happen.

Sometimes you would hear people who were not trans, who were very nice people, saying things like, "I hate going around the room and saying pronouns. Like, 'I'm sorry I'm not special!'" Because they had never had to tell people what their gender was, they found it a silly thing to do at best, and at worst, they actually felt that they looked boring and "not special" when they asked for the pronoun that would probably already have been used for them. Even though their boring and "not special" answer was being given by most of the people in the room.

I've also seen a lot of non-trans people feel like they are being insulted when they are called the word "cis," which is just a synonym for non-trans. The word NT, while not one I especially like, doesn't need to be branded a slur by people without disabilities, but I have definitely seen them have that reaction. In both examples, people from the dominant group seem offended by the idea of being called any word at all, instead of just being the group that is nameless because everyone is assumed to belong to it.

I think you might be getting to see why this seems like too long and involved a comment to post on the blog of someone I don't know! But to return to the TPGA dialogues, it is believed in the social justice community (by social justice I mean a certain way of looking at the world) that the appropriate way to talk about oppression is for the people who don't have privilege to be the authority because they experience the oppression firsthand. This doesn't mean that people who are privileged shouldn't get to talk at all, but that if a lot of oppressed people are saying a particular thing about oppression, the privileged people should accept it is true, even if it means apologizing for something they did wrong.

Also, to reiterate, since privileged people often feel attacked just because a situation is being made more equal, someone who thinks about social justice this way is probably not going to feel guilty and back off just because a privileged person says, "I feel like I'm being silenced and people from my group aren't allowed to talk." In fact, the reaction is more likely to be, "What you feel isn't the point."

If a parent thinks that the problem with TPGA dialogues has to do with, for example, everyone only caring about how anti-ableism could personally help them, then I don't think they understand what happened. It isn't possible to understand a lot of the things said by people with disabilities if you don't, either academically or just personally, understand the concept of privilege.

I actually move around about as much as a dead cat right now, so I made a pop culture blog:

Magikarp Refuses to Evolve

it's mostly going to be about TV, genre, how a vampire should treat his girlfriend, etc. you might not like it if you like this blog. you might though!